Robert Frank - The Americans - 200

The Scalo edition of Robert Frank's The Americans is a highly regarded reissue of one of the most influential photobooks of the 20th century. First published by Scalo Publishers in 1993 (with subsequent printings in 1995, 1998, and 2000), this version was produced in association with the National Gallery of Art. It introduced a new generation to Frank’s iconic documentation of mid-century United States culture.

The Scalo volume compiles Frank’s classic collection of 83 black-and-white photographs taken during his Guggenheim Fellowship road trips across the United States between 1955 and 1956. Frank’s raw, immediate, and often off-kilter framing captured a stark look at the American underbelly. The photographs deal directly with themes of racial inequality, consumer culture, politics, and isolation, contrasted with symbolic imagery of cars, jukeboxes, and the American flag. To ensure an uncompromised viewing experience, the Scalo edition places each photograph alone on its own page. Rather than placing text or titles directly under the images, all specific caption and location details are isolated and printed at the back of the book.

The hardcover edition is bound in fine black cloth featuring crisp white lettering stamped across the spine. Designed in full black matching the cloth beneath. The front features bold white lettering for the title and author name, split by a high-contrast crop of one of Frank's most famous photographs—Parade, Hoboken, New Jersey—which depicts a figure obscured by a large American flag hanging from a window. The Scalo printing is notable among collectors for being slightly larger in physical scale than the more recent Steidl editions, presenting the duotone/tritone imagery across a grander surface.


First published in France in 1958, then in the United States in 1959, Robert Frank's The Americans changed the course of twentieth-century photography. In 83 photographs, Frank looked beneath the surface of American life to reveal a people plagued by racism, ill-served by their politicians and rendered numb by a rapidly expanding culture of consumption. Yet he also found novel areas of beauty in simple, overlooked corners of American life. And it was not just Frank's subject matter--cars, jukeboxes and even the road itself―that redefined the icons of America; it was also his seemingly intuitive, immediate, off-kilter style, as well as his method of brilliantly linking his photographs together thematically, conceptually, formally and linguistically, that made The Americans so innovative. More of an ode or a poem than a literal document, the book is as powerful and provocative today as it was 56 years ago.



Copy and dustjacket in near fine condition.